


The White Night Riots

by de_Clare



Category: Peter Pan & Related Fandoms, Peter Pan - J. M. Barrie
Genre: 1970s, Alternate Universe - 1970s, Cocaine, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Genderqueer, Genderqueer Character, Gutterpunks, Harvey Milk - Freeform, M/M, Other, Rentboys, Riots, Trans, Trans Character, Transgender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-09
Updated: 2017-09-09
Packaged: 2018-12-25 14:07:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12037482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/de_Clare/pseuds/de_Clare
Summary: Pan is a genderqueer gutterpunk in 1970s San Francisco. At the advent of the HIV epidemic, Pan takes refuge as rentboy to James Hook, an emotionally-abusive banker, and slowly declines into profound depression. But when Harvey Milk's assassin is acquitted, queer people riot in their quiet neighborhood and the balance of power shifts.





	The White Night Riots

**Author's Note:**

> A/N 1: Trigger warning for emotional abuse.
> 
> A/N 2: Based on historical events. The White Night Riots was a San Francisco uprising following the acquittal of Harvey Milk's assassin. I hope that this story gives hope for abused individuals and communities who are waking up to their power.

After three years of passing as a grown man, Pan decided to paint his nails--a guts-and-glitter green that Tink, a diminutive sex worker from the anarchist squat on Haight Street, had given him as a goodbye present. He thought of her more often these days—and the Lost Boys, his punk hustler tribe of discarded queers, shunned Mormon sons, and people like Pan—so named because he was a little bit of everything. And nothing at all. 

What had happened to the boy whose goading smile and bawdy cockcrow persuaded a crowd to topple a paddy wagon full of black panthers? Well, he knew the answer to that—he’d developed a welts-and-insomnia bedbug allergy and when Neil got the wasting sickness and the doctors wouldn’t touch him because he was a gutterpunk, well, then being the kept boy of a banker in a downtown loft didn’t sound so bad at all. The vaulted white ceiling was high enough to fly.

Then why did he feel this gnawing sense of rebellion at the simple act of painting his nails, anesthetized with an overfull glass of grenache from James’ wine cabinet?

\--Too-straight and sniffling, James heaved his presence through the condo door. Pan was sure he’d been hitting the pixie dust. James snorted full-sinused, sucking back the nose-drip dregs, and then, with incongruous daintiness, threw back his long black locks and dabbed his eyes with the corner of a cotton handkerchief. Pan realized that James had been crying—shit, this was going to be worse than he thought.

James ran his fingers through Pan’s overgrown ginger hair and kissed him delicately, like something polished and carefully replaced on its shelf, then heavily slumped into a tall-straight chair across the kitchen table. “Well, won’t you pour some wine, since you’ve already decided to help yourself?”

Pan apologized, pouring a full, bulbous glass.

James graciously thanked him with, “That’s a burgundy glass, idiot,” before drinking heavily over the lip. 

James patted the breast of his pinstriped waistcoat, the bulge of his gun like a hard cock in blue jeans, a favorite prop for their evening dramas, saying calmly, “I’m going to kill myself. Don’t ask why.”

“Ok,” Pan said cooperatively.

“Don’t you bloody dare!” 

 

Pan looked down guiltily at his varnished fingernails.

Following his gaze, James forgot his threatened suicide, demanding--“What queeny bullshit is that!?” 

“Nail polish,” Pan answered neutrally. Just the facts, mum.

“Take it off! I won’t have tranny trash in my house!”

“I don’t have remover.” 

“There’s poppers in the cabinet. Use that.”

“That label’s just to throw off the cops.”

James fingers the gun in his pocket, glaring at Pan’s delicate fingers like a nest of centipedes—“Would this be better?”

“I’ll be right back.”

Pan stood, looking at James with a not-too-earnest gaze, and backed into the master bedroom. He reflexively glanced out the closed window, the view of the sleek next-door skyscraper, and contemplated flight. He’d watched the fog crawl in from the bay that evening—maybe he could ride its back to Berkeley and beyond.  
But he found that he already had the tiny brown bottle and was halfway through the bedroom door, when he felt the heart thump of distant, yet consuming roar. Hit kitchen chair shook, but James steadied himself with another gulp of the grenache. Pan opened the bottle, deciding to leave it unstoppered. As he dabbed it with a cottonball, there was another roar, closer, rattling the bottle on the glass-topped table.

“You know, the fag-killer got a pat on the back from the district attorney,” James said. Pan decided to say nothing and was surprised to find that the poppers were actually taking off the polish. He also felt a little warm and headachey as the room fogged up with the chemical miasma.

James languidly turned the gun on himself, “And that’s why I’m going to kill myself. I think I’ll get a handshake at City Hall. Another heroic fag-killer!”

Remembering himself, he turned the gun on Pan—“Or kill us both. Two for the price of one.” There was another roar and a sudden crack--as James’ cokey trigger finger perforated a sucking web in the laminated glass window, which whistled from the great height and for a moment Pan had to remind his throat how to breathe.

“Can’t you do something about that!?”

Pan peeled a corner of duct tape from his piecemeal chuck taylors and patched it over the shrieking hole, taking the opportunity to look for any signs that someone had been hit in an adjacent building--but what do you see or hear if someone’s been shot in their sleep?

“Disgusting. When are you going to buy new shoes?”

“When I can afford them. Maybe if I go back to hustling—“

“No!” James slammed his fist on the table. “I won’t have you bringing the clap into my home.”

“Well, I gotta make money somehow.” 

“You stay here RENT-FREE! Isn’t this life good enough for you!?”

“No!” The room sharpened in all its edged white angles and James stood up mechanically. Pan knew he’d said the forbidden word, but he was careless from the amyl nitrate and feeling an exalted sense of recklessness. Maybe he would goad James into finally shooting him--

He was spared an answer by shouting in the street. This was no Tenderloin scuffle. The sound rose and fell rhythmically and he could swear he heard the now familiar, cadenced, “We’re here. We’re queer. Don’t fuck with us!” as a mob protest rounded the corner. This was no acid and flowers demonstration—it was led by a line of fierce-looking drag queens doing high-kicks like the Rockettes gone paramilitary. 

James shoved Pan aside and threw open the window. When he saw the queens, he whispered in a confessional tone, “another heroic fag killer,” and pointing the gun out the window shouted--“I don’t believe in fairies!” 

And Pan, scared as he was righteous, threw his weight against James, who looked perplexed as he rocked backward, and in the same moment the dumpsters below rattled in time with a fiery roar—the black shell of police car consumed with black smoke a block away. He finally put it together—the queers were rising up. 

Not looking down, Pan mounted the window frame--rising above his own existential horror, above firebombed police cars, above the mob of shit-scared but determined queens wrenching the grates off of city hall with glitter painted fingernails. What a happy thought, he mused. And flew.


End file.
